Systems and methods herein generally relate to printing systems that print multiple logical pages on each physical sheet of print media (e.g., N-Up, booklet, signature, etc.), and more particularly to such printing that performs multiple printing passes.
In the printing domain, some features (e.g., N-Up, booklet, signature, etc.) allow multiple logical pages to be imposed on the same physical surface. For example, N-up printing prints multiple logical pages on each sheet of print media. For purposes herein “logical pages” are separate individual pages of a print job, each of which could be printed on a separate sheet of print media. However, by performing N-up printing, less marking material (ink, toner, etc.) and less print media (paper, transparencies, card stock, etc.) is used, which saves such resources and is more environmentally friendly.
In addition, printing or rendering a surface using a single spot color, such as CMYK+X (where X could be any specialty color, such as white, clear, gold, silver, orange, etc.) within a single layer range, is a popular feature in heavy production printing houses. More specifically, in order to print using colors other than the printer's permanent colors (e.g., red, green, blue (RGB) in a RGB printer; cyan, yellow, magenta, black (CMYK) in a CMYK printer; etc.) that are used for all print jobs, or the vast majority of print jobs, some printers include an additional housing (sometimes referred to as the fifth color housing, or Xth housing if more than 5 are enabled). The fifth color housing holds replaceable printing modules (sometimes referred to as a customer replaceable unit (CCU), fifth color module, spot color module, or imaging media cartridges) that print using more expensive and less frequently used marking materials (e.g., clear ink/toner, white ink/toner, gold ink/toner, silver ink/toner, orange ink/toner, etc.) and are separate from the permanent color printing modules. The fifth color housing allows switching of the replaceable printing modules seamlessly in minutes.